Why More Black Engineers Aren’t Being Hired In Silicon Valley

When Joshua Mann set foot in SpaceX on the first day of his internship three summers ago, the scene was not entirely unexpected. “I’ll be honest. When I got to SpaceX there weren’t a lot of black engineers there,” he said. “There was a feeling, did I really belong here?”

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When Joshua Mann set foot in SpaceX on the first day of his internship three summers ago, the scene was not entirely unexpected. “I’ll be honest. When I got to SpaceX there weren’t a lot of black engineers there,” he said. “There was a feeling, did I really belong here?”

Mann, at the time a 21-year-old Morehouse College student with a 3.96 GPA, had only two years of physics and pre-engineering classes under his belt while most of the other interns had at least two years of engineering classes, which meant more hands-on lab experience. The work itself was high-stakes: testing critical components of rocket engines that would one day take cargo and astronauts into space.

“Basically, what I had to do is seek assistance from people at the company — other people who had the insight I hadn’t learned in my classes,” said Mann, who is now 23. “I had to get to a place where I could believe I was there for a reason, that I could succeed.”